Economic insecurity and the common good Address to the Social Justice in the City Forum Melbourne, 25th February, 2009
Dr John Falzon Chief Executive Officer St Vincent de Paul Society National Council johnf@svdpnatcl.org.au
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I would like to begin by acknowledging the traditional owners and custodians of this land, the Wurundjeri People. I remember some years ago learning a difficult but beautiful lesson about life. I was working as a researcher with a civil society organisation in Sydney. There I was invited to attend a meeting of recovering drug addicts who were parents. We met together in an old pub that had been taken over by an order of nuns and turned into a community centre. They were working on a book together. This was a way of telling their stories. I am a firm believer in the healing power of stories, the transformative power of stories. Well, their stories certainly transformed me. They described the ways in which they had taken drugs in front of their young children, the pain they had inflicted on their children and themselves, their stories of making enough money to survive, feeding their children and supporting their habits. Some of the women described the difficulties of balancing family and work while working in the sex industry. The words that have remained with me in the strongest way, however, are the words of a young Aboriginal woman, describing her experiences of incarceration. She told me, quietly but firmly: “The cells are a sad place, brother. You don’t get to sleep in the cells.” I said at the beginning that I learned a difficult but beautiful lesson about life. You might be wondering, I suppose, what the lesson was. The lesson I learned was contained in the one word in the middle of this woman’s deeply poetic utterance. It was the word, “brother”. She bestowed this title on me through no merit of my own. I did nothing to prove any real kinship with her. Nor could I possibly claim to know what her experiences were like. It is true that I listened to her with an open heart but how could I count t his as being anything particularly special or unique? And yet she addressed me as her brother. When she did this she did something very powerful. She took me into the cells with her. She showed me how sad they were. She could no longer be someone whose life is alien to mine. She belonged to the same world as me. I belonged to her world, the world of the jail cells, the world where her sadness was the sadness of the world. You might be wondering what this story has to do with economic insecurity and the common good. Everything. This story has everything to do with both economic insecurity and the common good. We kid ourselves if we think that economic insecurity is something that began late last year. Let me assure you that this is not the case. Of course, there was always, during the time of economic growth, an unspoken assumption that most of the people who were really doing it tough had somehow brought this on themselves.
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How easy it was to imagine that they did not belong to our world, that their world was different. As if they were from another planet. Let me share with you a few things about this planet, our planet and economic insecurity. For one thing it’s worth noting that we’ve got quite a few things upside down. According to the ILO, for example, we learn that women do ⅔ of the world’s work, receive 5% of the world’s income and own 1% of the world’s assets. Economic insecurity, far from being manufactured at the household level, whether in highly industrialized Australia or Sub-Saharan Africa, is a constant for those who are essentially disempowered economically. This disempowerment is as much a product of history as it is of economic and social structures. The economic insecurity of your average low-income Australian household, for example, is characterized especially by such realities as a housing market that cannot provide housing to the poor, and a labour market that cannot provide income security, especially if you are a woman, if you are a sole parent with young children, if you have been denied access to reasonable educational opportunities, if you suffer from physical or mental health difficulties, if you have a disability, if you are Indigenous, if you are a refugee, if you have been made redundant and you do not have the requisite skills-set to make a transition to another line of work, especially if you over 40, and the list goes on. We are fortunate in Australia to still have a system of protection for people in relation to both the housing market and the labour market. It has to be said, however, that the public housing system is extremely run down. The recent announcement of infrastructure spending on 20,000 new units of public and community housing was welcome indeed, but the reality is that across Australia we are faced with a waiting list in excess of 200,000. A recent report from the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare shows that less than half of families in need were provided with public housing within three months of application, with some waiting two years or more. As for what used to be termed the “social security” system we now have a situation where the payments are generally considered inadequate, the compliance regimes are primarily punitive and the notion that charity should be relied on has become an accepted default. For the drug-using parents that I referred to at the beginning of my reflection today the only policy response that has recently been wheeled out and championed by both sides of politics is the completely inadequate tactic of threatening the parents with welfare quarantining. Which, incidentally, has also been wheeled out as a catch-all tactic to deal with the parents of children who are not attending school. Both of these issues are extremely serious. Neither is well-served by such a blunt policy tool. In Australia, the past decade has seen a 50% increase in the number of people imprisoned at the same time as a 30% decrease in the amount of Federal Funding for social housing. The countries where there is the greatest rate of imprisonment are also the countries with the greatest level of inequality. The United States of America leads the world as the most extreme incarcerator of its own citizens, with 1% of its adult population behind bars. If you count the people under community supervision or on probation, the total rises to 7 million, or 3.1% of the adult population.
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Economic insecurity is social insecurity. Social insecurity is personal insecurity. When the people are insecure, economically, socially, personally, you have before you the recipe for political insecurity. Frederic Ozanam saw this with frightening prescience, when he wrote: “There are a great many people who have too much and who wish to have more; there are a great many others who do not have enough, who have nothing, and who are willing to take if someone gives to them. Between these two classes, a confrontation is coming, and this menacing confrontation will be terrible: on the one side, the power of gold, on the other the power of despair.” The common good is no abstract value hovering above the gritty reality that grips the lives of people who have been consigned to the bottom of the heap in a society such as ours. No, the common good is predicated on the powerful human principle that we do belong to the same world, that the “dangerous classes” as they were known in 19th century Paris are our sisters and brothers. The next step in this logic is the radical proposition of the Beatitudes which, as Oscar Romero, said “have turned everything upside down” a logic in which the marginalized take precedence over the powerful. We have entered a period in which we, as a nation in the global context, are being given the opportunity to re-think what it means to be a society. We are being challenged to re-think what it means to build a society based on the common good. We are being challenged to think differently about the purpose of prosperity and the value of people. Nothing demeans people more than being left on the scrap-heap, neither included in the present nor empowered to take control of their future. Such is the reality of poverty and social exclusion. A time of crisis is also a time of change. The massive change is just as certain as the crisis. Rather than being overtaken by change, let’s be part of the change we dream of. Let us use this time to push not just for adjustments and bandaids but for a genuine re-positioning of the social instead of continuing to give primacy to the private. We are in the mess we are in because the strong sense of the social has been shafted in favour of a dogmatic attachment to the private. The risk has been shifted onto the shoulders of ordinary people, whether they are currently inside or outside the labour market. At the risk of stating the obvious I wish to reiterate the truth that the greatest power for progressive social change lies precisely with the excluded. The people who can best define and interpret the reality of exclusion and socio-economic insecurity are also potentially the only ones who can, in the end, determine the means towards, and the ends of, social inclusion. As the poet Bertolt Brecht put it so well, “the compassion of the oppressed for the oppressed is indispensable. It is the world’s one hope.”
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